Auction

For forty-four days last spring, Clare Morgana Gillis, James Foley, and Manu Brabo shared a terrible secret. Gillis and Foley are freelance reporters—she for The Atlantic and USA Today, he for GlobalPost—and Brabo is a freelance photojournalist from Spain. At 7 A.M. on April 5th, the three set out in a taxi from Benghazi, Libya, heading southwest along the Mediterranean coastal road, toward Brega and the shifting front in the civil war between rebels opposing Muammar Qaddafi and the Libyan Army regulars who were still loyal to his psychopathic regime. Also with them was Anton Hammerl, a freelance photojournalist and dual citizen of South Africa and Austria, who was based in London. Gillis, Foley, and Brabo had been in the country for weeks, and Hammerl had arrived five days earlier. As journalists readily do in conflict situations, they trusted their instincts about one another and together had been making daily reporting forays in the company of the rebels.

Within three hours, they had got much closer to the front than they had realized. Skeptical of a report that Qaddafi’s troops were three hundred metres away, they were walking along the side of the road when they abruptly came under fire. As they ran toward a small grove of trees, AK-47 bullets flew at them. Hammerl cried for help.

“Anton, are you O.K.?” Foley called.

“No.”

Soldiers in trucks were soon upon them, as Foley stood, waved his arms, and yelled in Arabic, “Sahafa! Sahafa!” (“Press!”). The shooting had stopped, but the beating was about to begin; Foley took the worst of that, including blows to the face and head with a rifle butt. He, Gillis, and Brabo spent the next six weeks in custody, being interrogated for alleged spying and shuttled from prison to prison (often blindfolded and with their hands bound). For the last two weeks of their captivity, they were confined to a safe house before being given suspended one-year prison sentences and allowed to leave the country.

Only when they had made it safely to Tunisia did they reveal to Hammerl’s widow, Penny Sukhraj, that they had seen her husband lying dead in the blood-soaked sand, a fact that they’d been afraid to disclose while being held. Even before they were permitted to telephone family members, about two weeks into their confinement, they had agreed not to discuss Hammerl’s fate, because their own was uncertain. Meanwhile, the Libyan government cruelly maintained that he was still alive.

One night recently, Gillis and Foley each briefly addressed a gathering at Christie’s, in Rockefeller Center, during the prelude to a charity auction organized by them and David Brabyn, a photojournalist and the creator of the Web site friendsofanton.org. More than seventy photographers or their estates had donated works to raise funds for the education of Hammerl’s three children—an eleven-year-old daughter, Aurora, and two sons, Neo, who is eight, and Hiro, who was six weeks old when his father died. Among the lots were images by Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, who perished together during a mortar attack in Misrata, Libya, fifteen days after Hammerl was killed, and João Silva, who lost both legs when he stepped on a land mine in Afghanistan, in 2010. By the end of the evening, the proceeds totalled almost a hundred and forty thousand dollars.

In his remarks, Foley said, “I first met Anton outside the Hotel Africa, the cut-rate freelancer hotel in Benghazi. He scolded me for offering him a cigarette so early in the morning, but he took it. . . . It was obvious that he had this complete enthusiasm for getting to come to Africa, to be working on the world stage again.”

Hammerl’s other obvious enthusiasm was for his family. He had daily Skype conversations with Sukhraj and Neo, and he made a point of sharing family photographs with Gillis, Foley, and Brabo.

Earlier in the day, as the photographs were being hung in the auction gallery, Sukhraj described how Hammerl’s photojournalism had been informed by his experience as a conscript in the South African military during the late eighties, when he was sent to fight in Angola.

“Going into combat enabled him to see what his country was about,” she said. “When he came out of the Army, he was enraged, and it made him want to tell that story. He did all kinds of documentary and news stories in Africa. He went to Uganda to photograph child soldiers. He did work about child prostitution in South Africa, and about children with AIDS living with their mothers in prison. Then, for a while, he took himself out of the running for conflict reporting. But he was very excited about his work in Libya.”

She continued, “Anton was not judgmental about people, but I think he was very hard on himself. The night before he died, he sent me a selection of a hundred and five photographs that he had taken that week. I said, ‘Aren’t you going to put them up on your Web site?’ He said, ‘No, no.’ He had done wonderful work, but he didn’t think it was good enough yet.” ♦

Mark Singer, a longtime contributor to the magazine, is the author of several books, including “Character Studies.”